NGC 1275 “blows bubbles” and drags filaments of “cold gas” into the surrounding
“multi-million degree X-ray emitting gas”
according to astronomers. Magnetic streamers, or filaments, are said to
confine the cold gas. The filaments are “a challenge for astronomers” to explain
why they haven’t evaporated in the hot gas or collapsed into stars from their
own gravity or been disrupted by tidal forces from other galaxies in the
cluster. The filaments are calculated to be 200 light-years thick and up to
20,000 light-years long (assuming that the galaxy is at its “cosmological
redshift distance”).
As has become usual when confronted by such filamentary structures,
astrophysicists meet the challenge by dropping onto the explanatory stage the
deus ex machina of magnetism – without acknowledging that electric currents
generate magnetic fields. (Such an acknowledgement, of course, would undermine
the consensus dogma that Gravity is God.)
But even in consensus dogma, a “multi-million degree X-ray emitting” substance
can’t be a “gas” – it is plasma. Only by ignoring the properties of plasma,
which have been known and
demonstrated in labs for a century, can astrophysicists maintain their
fantasy.
An awareness of plasma requires, at least, comparison of the “bubbles” with
Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) on the Sun. As the current that is driving a
double layer (DL) increases, the DL becomes unstable and expands, often
accelerating, as it gets larger. The current along the DL generates a magnetic
field that pinches the plasma within it into a thin filament. Because the forces
that confine the filament are self-generated at each point along the filament,
it is unaffected by the much weaker forces of evaporation, gravitational
collapse, and tidal disruption. It can remain coherent over distances that are
orders of magnitude greater than its thickness.
The Electric Universe proposes a bigger picture: An active galaxy is the center
of a plasma pinch in an intergalactic current. The X-rays are not being emitted
from a “hot gas” but are synchrotron radiation emitted by electrons spiraling in
the direction of the magnetic field. Instead of a black hole powering the
emissions and filaments, there is a plasma focus mechanism powered by the
intergalactic current.
Because plasma phenomena are similar at all scales, NGC 1275 would be a
galactic-scale version of a
planetary nebula. The rough circular symmetry we see is due to the galaxy’s
orientation with its axis along our line of sight: We’re “looking down the
barrel” of an
hourglass-shaped electrical discharge.
By Mel Acheson